A forthright response to the no-platforming and demonization of Germaine Greer:

I made the mistake of checking my FB. Which is all “ooh that evil Germaine Greer!”

There’s a whole fucking thread where men are telling each other how terrible at being feminists women are. Seriously what is this shit?

I’ve seen that thread! Or one just like it – the chances are there are many of them. It takes more than one Facebook thread for men to tell each other how terrible at being feminists women are – and to complain about how ugly and old and ugly feminist women like Greer are. The one I saw was at Pink News, and it’s foul.

I disagree with Greer about some things. The day I say she’s not a feminist is the day you need to book me in for a lobotomy because I’ve obviously seriously fucking lost it. The woman who’s written the kind of vital and compelling work for the movement she has isn’t a feminist? As judged by wee boys chatting shite on Facebook?

And again the same argument, “but she says transwomen aren’t women so she can’t be a feminist!” No. They are not. They are transwomen, and that’s not a bad thing (why would it be?) but born women they are not. Also, this is not a criterion for being a feminist, as feminists disagree on this issue.

Yes but the ones who disagree with the Established Truth (of today) are the Evil branch of feminists, and Evil feminists can’t really be feminists, so it is a criterion, if you look at it the right way.

An interesting talk at Oxford Skeptics in the Pub next month by Professor Gina Rippon.

There is a long history of debate about biological sex differences and their part in determining gender roles, with the ‘biology is destiny’ mantra being used to legitimise imbalances in these roles. The tradition is continuing, with new brain imaging techniques being hailed as sources of evidence of the ‘essential’ differences between men and women, and the concept of ‘hardwiring’ sneaking into popular parlance as a brain-based explanation for all kinds of gender gaps.

But the field is littered with many problems. Some are the product of ill-informed popular science writing ( neurotrash) based on the misunderstanding or misrepresentation of what brain imaging can tell us. Some, unfortunately involve poor science, with scientists using outdated and disproved stereotypes to design and interpret their research (neurosexism). These problems obscure or ignore the ‘neuronews’, the breakthroughs in our understanding of how plastic and permeable our brains are, and how the concept of ‘hard-wiring’ should be condemned to the dustbin of neurohistory.

This talk aims to offer ways of rooting out the neurotrash, stamping out the neurosexism and making way for neuronews.

Gina Rippon is Professor of Cognitive NeuroImaging in the Aston Brain Centre at Aston University. She has a background in psychology and physiology and uses brain imaging techniques such as Magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the relationship between patterns of brain activation and human sensory, cognitive and affective processes. Most recently her work has been in the field of developmental disorders such as autism. She has served as President of the British Psychophysiology Society (now the British Association of Cognitive Neuroscience).

She also writes and speaks on the use of neuroimaging techniques In the study of sex/gender differences, recently featured in the BBC Horizon programme “Is your Brain Male or Female?”. She is additionally involved in activities around the public communication of science, particularly in challenging the misuse of neuroscience to support gender stereotypes, and in work to correct the under-representation of women in STEM subjects. She has recently been appointed as an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association.

I would so go to that if I were in Oxford.

A friend pointed out this set of tips by Katie Dupere on how to be a good ally to trans people.

It’s irritating stuff, of course, but it very quickly goes from merely irritating to reversing everything we’ve learned about the hierarchical system that is “gender” over the past few decades.

For the merely irritating –

For those in socially disempowered positions, being able to define how you’re spoken about can be really powerful, Stryker says. But in addressing language that can be non-inclusive, it is important to move toward a goal of education — not alienation.

“It’s about creating a space so you can go deeper into the issue, rather than trying to police speech in a way that shuts down learning and awareness,” she says. “The ally has to not be defensive. They have to say, ‘Oh, I just said this thing that othered you. It’s interesting that I enacted my privileged position. I just learned something — thank you.'”

Give me a break.

I can see “oops,” I can see “oh, sorry” – assuming the “educator” is not an asshole, which is a risky assumption in situations of this kind. But I can also see “the language keeps changing, I can’t keep up,” with laughter or annoyance or both. I cannot see “Oh, I just said this thing that othered you. It’s interesting that I enacted my privileged position. I just learned something — thank you.” Anyone perfected enough to utter those three sentences is far too perfected to other anyone or enact a privileged position even by accident. No one else on the planet would utter those three sentences.

Number 1 is about pronouns – the word “preferred” is out, because it’s not about preferences, it’s about what people really truly literally are, absolutely, no ifs ands or buts, unequivocally, no more to be said, don’t you dare pause to think about it, shut the fuck up, die cis scum.

Number 2 is where we breezily throw feminism overboard and proceed on our voyage into the paradise of True Gender.

2. Saying someone was “born a boy/girl.”

No matter how old a transgender person is when they come out, it’s important to acknowledge they may feel their gender has always been the same one they are just now publicly claiming. To explain this concept, Stryker quotes Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

Stryker explains that nobody is truly born a boy or a girl; rather, we evolve to truly claim those (or other) gender markers as our own. Saying someone was born a boy or girl suggests they were inherently one gender, but chose to be another.

“We are all assigned male, female, or intersex at birth, and become the people we are,” Stryker says.

See what she did there? One, she completely reversed the meaning of Simone de Beauvoir’s line, and two, she said we all claim gender markers as our own. That is such a crock of shit I can hardly believe my eyes.

This isn’t being a “good ally,” this is trying to be more Catholic than the pope.

What’s wrong with Ireland:

When Helen Linehan found out in 2004 that there was something fatally wrong with the 11-week-old foetus she was carrying, she was advised to have an immediate termination, because doctors knew there was no chance that the baby would survive longer than an hour after birth.

The foetus had a condition known as acrania, which meant that its skull had not closed over the brain. Although it probably would have survived inside the womb, it would not have lived once it was born, and doctors were clear that termination was the only option. Accompanied by her husband, Graham – writer of the television comedy series Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd – she had an abortion three days later in a hospital near their home in London. “It was terribly sad and devastating, but it was handled well,” she said.

Some months later, they moved back to Ireland, where they discovered that, had they been living there during this first pregnancy, Helen would have been forced to carry the pregnancy to term, or face a 14-year prison sentence for procuring an illegal abortion.

In the certain knowledge that the baby born of the pregnancy would die at birth. Ireland considered it right for Helen Linehan and the baby to go through that, rather than closing down the process early.

The shock of that revelation has prompted the couple to speak out about their experience for the first time, as part of a campaign by Amnesty Internationalcalling for decriminalisation of abortion in Ireland. The fact that abortion is illegal in Ireland, even in cases where there is no chance for the foetus to survive, makes Ireland “a dangerous place to be pregnant”, said Graham. “I don’t think it is safe for women in Ireland to be pregnant. Abortion is an important medical procedure and when that’s taken off the table, then you’re not safe. A place without abortion puts two lives in danger, not one,” he said.

Bishops are cruel men.

Helen said she was prompted to make the film by a sense of outrage at how she could have been criminalised for a difficult decision had she not been living in England at the time. She would have found it very hard to have been forced to carry a baby to term in the knowledge that it was going to die as soon as it was born.

“It would have been life-changing. To endure the full-term pregnancy, and to come home empty-handed and with the physical changes that come with pregnancy – it would have been awful. I don’t know how I would I have got through that, mentally or physically,” she said.

She described Ireland’s abortion laws as “abusive”. “It is a form of abuse against women. We need to have our own choices,” she said. “If men had babies, the laws would be very different.”

But men don’t have babies, so the law is what it is.

There has been growing demand for the Irish government to allow a referendum on legalising abortion, and last month thousands marched through Dublin to show their support for decriminalisation. The death of Savita Halappanavar in 2012, after she was denied an abortion when she began miscarrying, focused attention on the issue, as did reports last year of the treatment of a young asylum seeker who had been raped before coming to Ireland, who was refused an abortion by the Irish health service. When she tried to escape to England to have an abortion, she was arrested and deported back to Ireland, where she was forced to go ahead with the pregnancy. The baby was given up for adoption.

If men had babies, the laws would be very different.

But there’s a counter-petition.

There is a petition to Cardiff to cancel Germaine Greer’s talk. I find it abhorrent that I must make a counterpetition so a second wave feminist isn’t silenced by those who could just as easily not go to the lecture yet instead have decided to try and no platform her, to silence her. They’ve given no evidence in the petition either, just slurs.

This reactionary tactic of calling a woman a ‘transphobe’ is no different than calling someone a ‘commie’ in 1960’s America during the cold war. It’s a slur that contains no analysis, just an emotional response that is primarily used against women who talk about women’s biological realities, not gender identities.

Greer centers females/women in her work. I fail to see how anyone who centers women is encouraging violence against anyone.

Her position on gender doesn’t make anyone unsafe. The very marginalized group that Greer talks to and about is women. We are a protected class. Silencing her is silencing us.

Enough is enough.  Stop  no platforming women who only want to talk about women’s rights and women’s lives.

God I hate finding myself agreeing with Brendan O’Neill…and not just for political reasons, but because he’s so transparently and irritatingly a Self-conscious Preening Contrarian. But it can’t be helped: for once Preening Contrarian has a point.

If you want to know how crazy, even Kafkaesque, this young millennium has become, consider this: yesterday it was reported that a person with a penis — Caitlyn Jenner — will be named Glamour magazine’s Woman of the Year, while over at Cardiff University a woman who has done more than most to secure the liberation of womankind — Germaine Greer — was denounced by a swarm of Stepford Students as ‘transphobic’, someone who should make all right-minded people feel ‘sick to [their] stomachs’.

Does it irritate me that Caitlyn Jenner has been named anybody’s Woman of the Year? Yes, it does. I think there are far better candidates, many thousands of them. I don’t think anything Caitlyn Jenner has done is significant enough or valuable enough for that title. And yes, I also think Caitlyn Jenner won enough titles and trophies and fame as Bruce Jenner competing in a sport that was closed to women; I don’t think Caitlyn Jenner is now somehow magically a great hero or role model to women.

Alarmingly, Cardiff’s feminist students are running the campaign to shut Greer down. The petition for her lecture to be cancelled was started by the student union women’s officer, who says Greer’s views have ‘no place in feminism’. What a spoilt, ungrateful generation, hilariously unaware that their very ability to speak their minds and rouse some rabble is down to decades of intellectual and social agitation by people like Greer. She helped give them a voice; they try to silence hers.

That is, indeed, a big part of what makes it so galling. They contemptuously dismiss us old trouts as “second-wave” while flourishing on the possibilities that feminists like Greer made possible.

‘Trans-exclusionary views should have no place in… society’, says the Greerphobic petition. Who died and made the jumped-up Joe Stalins of student bureaucracy into the gods of what can be said? Greer, and anyone else for that matter, should be free to say whatever they want about trans politics, to critique it and even mock it, to argue that it’s pure hocus pocus to claim someone can change his or her sex simply by declaring ‘I have changed my sex’. Blasphemy is a hard-won right, and we should be free to blaspheme against both the old religions and new ones like transmania. We should be as free to doubt the womanhood of Caitlyn Jenner as we are to doubt the divinity of Jesus.

Of Caitlyn Jenner, yes. Of trans women with fewer advantages and privileges than she has – which would be pretty much all of them – maybe not. Preening Contrarian oversimplifies, as always, but in this case there’s room for him to get some things right.

But don’t worry – Huffington Post UK has a post by another Cardiff student who explains why it’s such a good idea to cancel Germaine Greer’s lecture.

So, notable second-wave feminist writer and scholar Germaine Greer is transphobic (more specifically transmisogynistic).

That’s the first sentence. It made me want very badly to stop reading. Why? That stupid “second-wave” shit. That label makes it sound as if Germaine Greer simply stopped thinking around 1975, and morphed into a statue that can be wheeled out to say 1975 things but nothing else.

Also, of course, the “transphobic (more specifically transmisogynistic)” part, which I have learned to be deeply suspicious of.

But maybe the student, Payton Quinn, goes on to make a case?

No.

This is not really a point for debate because there is a plethora of accounts from her talks, books and articles, where she’s been clear about her position on trans women and by extension all trans people.

Five links there. Let’s check them:

1. Pink News reporting on other students at another university citing her “transmisogynistic words and actions.” Worthless.

2. IBTimes including these two paragraphs in a long article:

Some feminists, however, have maintained an anti-trans stance. In The Whole Woman, Germaine Greer compares trans women to rapists: “When he forces his way into the few private spaces woman may enjoy and shouts down their objections, and bombards the women who will not accept him with hate mail, he does as rapists have always done.”

Earlier this year, Greer claimed there was no such thing as transphobia, suggesting trans women are not women because they do not know what it is like to have a “smelly vagina”.

3. A 2009 piece from a US feminist blog, quoting two paragraphs from a Guardian article by Greer:

In plainer terms what the academic feminists could be taken to be saying is that (a) you’re a woman if you think you are and (b) you’re a woman if other people think you are. Unfortunately (b) cannot be made to follow from (a).

Nowadays we are all likely to meet people who think they are women, have women’s names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody, though it isn’t polite to say so. We pretend that all the people passing for female really are. Other delusions may be challenged, but not a man’s delusion that he is female.

4. A piece from Green Left Weekly rehashing the same material.

5. A 404 Error.

Not remotely what it purports to be, a plethora of accounts from her talks, books and articles – rather, four quoted paragraphs, and a lot of secondary comment – in short, four paragraphs and a bunch of recycled accusations. I’m well familiar with this tactic – this recycling of each other’s accusations and cries of outrage and treating that as evidence of something. “Look how loudly we’re all shouting about her! Obviously that means she’s as bad as we say, and worse!”

Payton Quinn goes on:

If you believe that trans women are women, as you should because they are, then what Germaine Greer is espousing in her campaign against them is misogyny and surely no feminism should include any form of misogyny.

Her premises are wrong, and her conclusion doesn’t follow from them in any case.

Hopefully you’re still on board so far, because if you’re not it can be assumed that no matter how measured and reasoned my position on no-platforming is in this instance, you’re not going to agree.

Well that settles that then.

I won’t inflict much more of Payton Quinn on you, but near the end there is this also-familiar trick of blaming a feminist woman for violence against trans women – yes specifically trans women, not trans people:

When we’re living in a climate where trans women (particularly trans women of colour) are being murdered with little to no repercussions, are not even allowed to use the correct bathrooms, are harassed in their own home and hate crimes against them is still on the rise – do you think that debating Germaine Greer once again on whether or not trans women deserve basic human rights and protection is the key to a resolution?

For me the answer is clear: The safety of trans people outweighs the right of cis women to question the validity of their gender expression.

Always.

It’s always about the cis women, and making them shut the fuck up.

Another one.

A petition, by a student at Cardiff University, to Cardiff University, demanding that it cancel a scheduled lecture by Germaine Greer.

The lecture is scheduled for November 18 and according to the CU blog it’s fully booked.

Academic and broadcaster Professor Germaine Greer will deliver this year’s Hadyn Ellis Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday 18 November 2015.

Professor Greer is widely considered one of the most influential commentators on 21st century life. She has made her presence felt on everything from Newsnight Review to Celebrity Big Brother. A former professor of English at Warwick University, Professor Greer became a household name when she published The Female Eunuch, attracting praise and criticism in more or less equal measure. She has since highlighted injustice against women in Asia and Africa, and managed an area of rainforest in her native Australia. On a raft of contentious issues, she takes a refreshingly practical view where others mire themselves in political correctness.

So the petition says No, undo all that; tell her to stay away, because she’s Dangerous.

On the 18th November 2015, writer and academic Germaine Greer is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Cardiff University entitled ‘Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century’.

Greer has demonstrated time and time again her misogynistic views towards trans women, including continually misgendering trans women and denying the existence of transphobia altogether.

Trans-exclusionary views should have no place in feminism or society. Such attitudes contribute to the high levels of stigma, hatred and violence towards trans people – particularly trans women – both in the UK and across the world.

While debate in a University should be encouraged, hosting a speaker with such problematic and hateful views towards marginalised and vulnerable groups is dangerous. Allowing Greer a platform endorses her views, and by extension, the transmisogyny which she continues to perpetuate.

Universities should prioritise the voices of the most vulnerable on their campuses, not invite speakers who seek to further marginalise them.

We urge Cardiff University to cancel this event.

Do I believe that Germaine Greer contributes to violence against trans people? Not for one second.

Ensaf Haidar shared a selfie on Facebook:

Michael Moorcock talked to Andrea Dworkin for the New Statesman in 1995.

Michael Moorcock: After “Right-Wing Women” and “Ice and Fire” you wrote “Intercourse“. Another book which helped me clarify confusions about my own sexual relationships. You argue that attitudes to conventional sexual intercourse enshrine and perpetuate sexual inequality. Several reviewers accused you of saying that all intercourse was rape. I haven’t found a hint of that anywhere in the book. Is that what you are saying?

Andrea Dworkin: No, I wasn’t saying that and I didn’t say that, then or ever. There is a long section in Right-Wing Women on intercourse in marriage. My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse–it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman. I said that when we look at sexual liberation and the law, we need to look not only at which sexual acts are forbidden, but which are compelled.

The whole issue of intercourse as this culture’s penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the “all sex is rape” slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don’t think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.

It’s important to say, too, that the pornographers, especially Playboy, have published the “all sex is rape” slander repeatedly over the years, and it’s been taken up by others like Time who, when challenged, cannot cite a source in my work.

That’s how it’s done.

Michael Moorcock: You have been wildly and destructively misquoted. I’ve been told that you hate all men, believe in biological determinism, write pornography while condemning it, have been censored under the very “laws” you introduced in Canada and so on. I know these allegations have no foundation, but they’re commonly repeated. Do you know their source?

Andrea Dworkin: Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and lobbying groups for pornographers. Some of the lobbying groups call themselves anti-censorship, but they spend so much time maligning MacKinnon and myself that it is hard to take them seriously. And it seems to be only defending pornography that brings them out. I would define illiteracy as the basic speech problem in the US, but I don’t see any effort to deal with it as a political emergency with constitutionally based remedies, such as lawsuits against cities and states on behalf of illiterate populations characterised by race and class, purposefully excluded by public policy from learning how to read and write. Fighting MacKinnon and me is equivalent to going to Club Med rather than doing real work.

It’s much the same with the war on “TERFs” – like looking for the diamond under the streetlight instead of where you dropped it.

Guest post by Bjarte Foshaug.

Hardly anything has greater potential for introducing absurdities into an argument than using words in a different meaning than your opponent while continuing to act as if you were both still talking about the same thing. Now, obviously words don’t mean anything in themselves, but get their meanings from us. If someone wants to apply the word “fish” to what most people call “bird”, and vice versa, they are free to do so. But then it’s either disingenuous, or stupid, or both, to go on talking as if everyone else were using the words in the same way. It’s as if we were having a conversation about clubs for hitting baseballs (let’s call them “bats(1)”), and I suddenly started talking about flying mammals (let’s call them “bats(2)”) and how you’ve completely misunderstood baseball for failing to consider the relevance of Chiroptera to the sport.

We see this whenever atheists present arguments against the existence of a supernatural, intelligent creator of the universe (let’s call it “God(1)”), and “philosophically sophisticated” theists answer by pointing to the existence of Life, the Universe and Everything (let’s call it “God(2)”), as if this refuted the atheist position. And we see it whenever feminists present arguments for the equality of people with a strong preponderance of certain innate, physical traits more commonly found in mothers than in fathers (let’s call them “women(1)”), while trans* activists try to make it all about people who think or feel a certain way, or subscribe to certain cultural norms etc. (let’s call them “women(2)”).

I am sure we are all familiar with Daniel Dennett’s concept of “deepities”, but anyway: A deepity is an ambiguous statement with two possible interpretations. One of these interpretations makes the statement true but trivial, while the other makes it profound but false. I have identified a similar kind of phenomenon except that in this case the statement is either true but irrelevant, or relevant but false depending on which interpretation you choose. God(2) is no more relevant to a conversation about God(1) than flying mammals are to a conversation about clubs for hitting baseballs. The only thing that makes it seem relevant is the word “God” itself, which clearly doesn’t mean the same thing in the two cases. I would argue that the same thing goes for women(2) vs. women(1).

In both cases there is usually an element of trying – consciously or not – to have it both ways: If challenged, you can always fall back on the “safe” true but trivial/irrelevant interpretation, but for all other intents and purposes you take credit for the profundity/relevancy of the second interpretation. I can’t tell you how many religious people in my experience have attempted to first “prove” the proposition “God exists” TRUE by pointing to the existence of God(2) before changing the definition back to God(1) in order to make the proposition thus “proven” seem profound or relevant.

Trans* activist rhetoric seems to be full of equivocations like this:
• Being a “woman2”, is all about how you think or feel about yourself. Yet if a person who rejects the entire framework of “male” vs. “female” ways of thinking or feeling simply calls herself a “woman(1)” as a convenient shorthand for certain physical traits, she is still considered “cis”, which implies acceptance of that very same framework and identification as a woman(2).
• Being a “woman(2)” has nothing to do with physical traits, yet feminists who fight against discrimination of women(1) based on physical traits, are being inconsistent or hypocritical if they don’t change their cause entirely and turn all their focus towards the discrimination of women(2).
• Being a “woman(2)” has nothing to do with physical traits, yet straight men(1) or lesbian women(1) who are attracted to women(1) based on physical traits are being inconsistent or hypocritical if they don’t consider women(2) as potential partners.
• Etc. etc…

Justin Trudeau says he’s a feminist, and proud to be one.

In an interview, co-sponsored by the Toronto Star, which aired on Monday night before the election (Oct. 18), Trudeau was asked by journalist Francine Pelletier if he would describe himself as a feminist.

“There seems to be a lot of anger,” Pelletier asked, “not just at women, but at feminism and feminists. Would you describe yourself as a feminist?”

“Yes. Yes, I am a feminist,” said Trudeau. “I’m proud to be a feminist.”

And not only that…

Trudeau added that the public should pay more attention to developments in popular culture like Gamergate—a long-running controversy about sexism and violence toward women in video game culture.

“The things we see online,” he said, “whether it is issues like gamergate or video games misogyny in popular culture, it is something that we need to stand clearly against.”

And, I’m told, he plans to have 50/50 women and men in his cabinet.

Ok then.

In 1987, Ursula K. LeGuin sent a letter to an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich who had asked her to blurb a new anthology of science fiction stories.

John Radziewicz
Senior Editor
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
111 5th Ave
New York NY 10003

Dear Mr Radziewicz,

I can imagine myself blurbing a book in which Brian Aldiss, predictably, sneers at my work, because then I could preen myself on my magnanimity. But I cannot imagine myself blurbing a book, the first of the series, which not only contains no writing by women, but the tone of which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room. That would not be magnanimity, but foolishness. Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here.

Yours truly,
(Signed)
Ursula K. Le Guin

That was nearly 30 years ago. Very damn little has changed.

This is very funny but also painfully true:

SIX WORDS TO REMOVE FROM YOUR VOCABULARY TO BE A BETTER ALLY TO ME by Wayne Gladstone.

Sure, you’re a good person. Each day you learn a little more about the rest of humanity, and just by clicking this link you’ve already shown your interest in being a better ally. But while you’ve living a good life, checking your privilege and learning about people of different races, religions, social orientations and identities, there’s an ally opportunity you might have overlooked. The smallest minority. Me. And while I may be a minority of one, I must remind you that my opinion of you is not based on a measured consideration of your cumulative actions, but a far more easily defined concern determined by how well you, my potential ally, adhere to my evolving set of words and considerations.

This is where we are. “How dare you not take into account my [ ____________ ] whenever you say anything?”

Let’s see…first of all, I don’t even know who you are? You seem to think we’re close, or used to be close, but I have no idea who you are. Your handle rings a bell, but that’s it.

Second…well see above, and then ask yourself, why would I?

Third…there are people who aren’t you?

Fourth – I don’t care.

Fifth – how dare you not take into account my 1-4?

And an infinite regress ensues.

One of the six examples:

“Wha?”

Yes, the dropping of the “t” in the word “what” has come to express an increased degree of incredulity. While some take issue with this word as an example of race appropriation, that argument is belied by the racist assumption that this word originated in the African American community in the first place. Instead, “wha” is personally problematic because it reminds me of the two months I had to go to speech therapy in second grade to better pronounce my “T’s.” So be a better ally. Say “what” the way it was intended, and be grateful the 20th letter of the alphabet comes so easily to you.

Exactly, just the way being a woman comes so easily to me and all the women I know.

H/t G.

Newsweek Pakistan reports:

The death toll from last month’s haj stampede has topped 2,000, according to tallies given by foreign officials, making it the deadliest disaster in the pilgrimage’s history by far.

Saudi Arabia has yet to provide an updated death toll after saying 769 people died in the tragedy near Mecca, home of Islam’s holiest sites. But figures given by more than 30 governments around the world show that at least 2,097 foreign pilgrims have died.

That’s so horrific. It wasn’t an earthquake or a flood or a mudslide, it was just way too many people in one place, trying to carry out a “religious obligation” that dates from a time when Islam was a local religion and the locality was sparsely populated. It was just way too many people, crowding and pressing and suffocating each other, to the tune of over two thousand human beings.

The loss of life in the Sept. 24 disaster far exceeds the 1,426 pilgrims who died in the haj’s worst previous incident—a tunnel stampede in July 1990.

Here is a breakdown of the dead from foreign governments:

Iran: 464 dead

Nigeria: 199 dead

Mali: 198 dead

Egypt: 182 dead

Bangladesh: 137

Indonesia: 129 dead

India: 116 dead

Pakistan: 89 dead

Cameroon: 76 dead

Niger: 72 dead

Senegal: 62 dead

And so on, in descending order.

You know what would be good? Merciful, helpful, compassionate, while still being religiously obedient? If all the top clerics put their heads together and issued a Ruling that now that there are so many Muslims, the hajj is a pilgrimage to the Most Important Mosque in one’s country or region. Period; end of discussion.